[asdff]

Meanwhile, I've never had a socket failure, and I've upgraded the RAM on the 2012 mac I am using 2x now over its life (once to get to 8gb, a second time when users reported the computer could take 16gb despite what apple says). If I had soldered ram then I would be saddled with 4gb ram total and this computer would not be easily running mojave and allowing me to post this comment with 3 dozen tabs open in the background.

[acdha]

Again, I’m not saying that sockets are entirely bad but remember that the claim here is that this was just a cash grab when there are valid engineering trade offs. You’ve been lucky at n=small but DIMM failures was a relatively well-known thing to troubleshoot - notably more common for laptops which see more shock & vibration - and while having that expansion capability is certainly nice, it also made the system slower over the course of its lifetime. I don’t love the RAM constraints either[1] but picking something which is smaller, faster, and more durable is a very defensible engineering call and I think portraying that as a cynical cash grab is more intellectually lazy than we should expect around here. Notice how the person I replied to has been unable to engage with this at all beyond cheap shots which are indistinguishable from the posts you’d have found in some PC vs. Mac thread 3 decades ago.

1. Although I will note that it’s been many years since I used a browser which couldn’t suspend unused tabs.

[asdff]

So imagine it wasn't soldered. Was apple justified back then asking for $200 for another 4gb of DDR3? Absolutely not. The RAM was identical to what you could get from crucial or anyone else. HDD upgrades were the same way. It's just a 2.5" SATA but Apple's pricing suggested they were made of gold. Maybe soldered ram is more justified today, but you'd be ignorant of the history of this company to suggest they aren't simultaneously trying to screw you on upgrades.

[acdha]

Yes, I made those same upgrades both personally and professionally. I’m not saying you can’t criticize pricing, just that in a technical forum I’d also expect acknowledgement that there are benefits rather than an assertion rejecting that possibility.

I’d also be curious how many people ever did this - one interesting question is what percentage of users need to actually use an option for it to be expected. I haven’t looked for data in years but at one point heard that it was something under 20% of people ever upgrading their Mac.